I went ahead and created some leaderboard icons for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. I think they look alright, better than nothing.

Emulator runs, from this day, have and will be banned from submission. Refer to my other thread, I will not go into detail on why this is the best decision:

No, there will not be a seperate leaderboard for emulator runs, differences are still too major between them. The people whose run has been banned now and really feel unjustified, hit me up on Discord (Mentro#3169). If there's enough demand, we might work something out. But for now, the people who have emulator runs on the leaderboard are inactive and probably forgot that they even have a run for this game. This will do.

Also, runs will, from this day onward, be timed without the loading screens to guarantee a more competitive and just competition. I will retime all current runs, and all further submissions. Runs will be submitted WITH loads, I will edit the time WITHOUT loads. Leaderboard placement will, of course, be judged by your loadless time. I will time everything that the player still has control over, for example skipping cutscenes is timed, choosing stages also is timed, loading screens are not. I will start timing once the loading screen goes into the black screen with the stage's name on the screen, and when finishing stages or selecting them on the map I'll start timing once the entire screen is filled black.

About 100%: If there's enough demand for the category, I will create it. It's a legit run which will take longer, and show more of the actual game. Though, I have the feeling once creating it, it would stay empty for a long while, and I refrain from creating empty and dead leaderboards just for the sake of completion.

So as I recently found out, there's a huge issue with emulator runs. As of now, all of the emulator versions are allowed, which wouldn't be an issue if there wouldn't be cycles in certain stages that only emulator can get (I don't know why that's the case). Those cycles are not replicable on an actual PS2. Mangombage's 23:03 was utilizing those unreplicable cycles.

The following cycles are not replicable on an actual PS2:

Kelpazoic Jungle: https://gyazo.com/ec371a4a773f92aa3c234a243c142a14 (If you try to just walk, you will definitely get hit and pushed back to the left)

Canning Factory: https://gyazo.com/55cf698f1ffa0eb3dd28450c103e3b1f (This is not even close on PS2, you will always have to wait for like 5 seconds until they even come out)

Another issue that was already talked about were loading times, specifically Laure's 21:57 loads. We assumed that the faster loading times resulted from using the "Greatest Hits" version of the game, but that's probably faulty. Cyberdemon531 is using the same version of the game as Laure, but is still getting the same loads as me and Hdot12. The faster loading times are resulted from a different model. Me, Hdot12 and Cyberdemon531 are using a SCPH-90001, which is generally speaking the fastest model regarding loading times and lag reduction, but there are exceptions. This might be one of them. Laure is using a SCPH-79001, which is probably the reason for the big difference of loading times, that model seems to be the best for this specific game.

There's a lot of stuff going on, but there are solutions. While they might seem rough, they are definitely necessary to create a fair leaderboard.

My suggestion regarding emulators: Remove the current emulator runs and ban any further emulator submissions. Having cycles on emulator that are not replicable on console is enough of a reason for that action, at least for me. Another solution would be to split console and emulator runs into two different categories. Certain emulators would then have to be banned though, because they load the game too fast. ePSXe 1.9.0 would be a good limitation for emulator runners.

My suggestion regarding loading times for console runs: Loadless, as simple as that. Submit your run, mods will time all the loading screens of your run and then subtract that from your RTA time. Simple, efficient, fair (further definition for loading times have to be defined among mods).

The current runs would have to be retimed for loadless, and I would definitely do that to help the mods.

So I was having this weird issue with OBS crashing my epsxe 1.9.0 every exact 15 minutes, so I decided to use Xsplit instead, and the crashes stopped. However, I had mad problems with Xsplits audio configuring, so I decided to give Streamlabs OBS a try, and the audio was perfect. However, the crashes even happen on the Streamlabs version, not as frequent as on normal OBS, but probably every 30 minutes. It has to do something with Streamlabs OBS, since I didn't experience any crashes with Xsplit. Anyone had this problem and fixed it, or knows a solution?